March 19, 2004

Sitting on a Jury

On Wednesday I was selected to serve on a jury. The case, nauseatingly enough, turned out to be an extremely frivolous (IMO!) personal-injury lawsuit brought about by a self-centered Buckhead bitch against a retired Army Colonel who had the misfortune of hitting her car four years ago. The woman had already gotten a sizeable settlement from the old guy's insurance which had enabled her to buy a brand-new BMW (which she proceeded to wreck two years later.) She wanted us to make the old guy responsible for ALL her medical bills from the time of the accident on and that includes the future. She also wanted big bucks (like $100,000s) for "pain and suffering." Her attorney and her witnesses made some really crazy claims including wildly exaggerating the circumstances of the accident (they claimed the old guy hit her at 50 MPH on Peachtree Road in rush hour traffic!) when photos of her old car clearly showed an impact just slightly worse than a fender-bender. They also kept saying the old man had "t-boned" her when the photos showed no side impact at all. On top of that, they were claiming that her life was severely disrupted and that she was unable to do "anything" for two whole years - then it came out that she was running a successful home business during that time, was acting as chairman of a couple of high-profile charity events, and playing sports such as tennis and going scuba diving. She blamed the old guy hitting her on everything that has gone wrong in her life for four years from breakups with boyfriends to her cellulite (it seems.)

It just burned my ass that this lady wanted us to in effect reach into the pockets of this old man and heap tons of cash on her just because she has an occasional back-ache and she can't keep a relationship going for more than a year. I wasn't the only one and it only took us, the jury, three hours total to render a verdict that gave her $14000 to cover her medical costs (which had already been paid by insurance, incidentally) plus $3,000 for "pain and suffering." A total of $17,000 when she had been looking for a verdict in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. After paying her attorney and her court costs, this case will wind up actually costing her and that's how we designed it. We all agreed that the suit was frivolous and that the old man wasn't responsible for her various mental and physical maladies now and forever.

She burst into tears upon hearing the verdict. The old guy and his wife were crying for joy in the lobby and he actually gave me a tight hug. I feel like I had the chance to do right by somebody and I have a much better opinion of how our justice system works.